5 Key takeaways from Shigeru Ban's AIA26 Architalk
Last week in San Diego, 2026 Gold Medal Award winner Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, shared what makes his vision so unique.
“Architecture’s greatest impact is often not measured in monuments,” said Katie Swenson, Assoc. AIA, in her introduction to Shigeru Ban’s Architalk at AIA26 in San Diego last week. It was a fitting lead-in to a conversation about Ban’s body of work, which has prioritized humanity and social responsibility, in addition to innovative design and unexpected materials, at every turn.
Ban, who was recognized as the winner of AIA’s 2026 Gold Medal Award at the conference, took the stage on Thursday to go in-depth on some of his most famous projects—encapsulating everything from commercial work in Tokyo’s highbrow Ginza shopping district to temporary shelter for disaster survivors across the world. Read on for five insights from his presentation.
Practitioners shouldn't need to choose between design excellence and social responsibility.
A foundational belief of Ban’s architectural practice is that the skills of an architect should not be reserved for the privileged.
In his talk, Ban shared insights from his extensive work on evacuation and disaster recovery facilities across the world. “Privacy is [the] most basic human right,” Ban said. “After the Kobe earthquake [in 1995], I developed a partition system.” However, the system was rejected multiple times by local governments in Japan after disasters because, Ban said, “there [was] no example of such a thing, and also, they said, it’s easier to control people without partitions, but I didn’t give up.”
After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster, Ban found an evacuation facility managed by a physics teacher at a local high school who supported his partition proposal. “We made a 500-family unit in one week,” he said, using a structure made from paper tubes, one of Ban’s signature materials, and hanging curtains. This simple and elegant solution has since been used to aid in further disaster recovery, including in 2020, when the Japanese city of Kumamoto was dealing with the dual disasters of flooding and the COVID-19 pandemic.
It's important to let a project's surroundings inform and inspire the design.
The Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, designed by Ban’s firm and completed in 2014, posed several design challenges. Aside from the contextual challenge of situating a new building at the end of a commercial street full of historic brick structures, the site itself didn’t necessarily lend itself to what the clients were asking for. There was no space, Ban said, for a lobby or foyer entrance on the ground floor.
As part of the design, a semi-outdoor stair sits between the building and the Prodema wood resin composite screen that covers the exterior. A transparent elevator in the corner of the entrance takes visitors to the rooftop. Whether via stairs or elevator, visitors start their journey through the museum at the top level.
“When you ski, you take a lift to go up to the top of the mountain and enjoy the beautiful mountain view, and you come down by skiing,” he said. “This is the same process. You take a stair or lift to go up to the top of the mountain and enjoy the mountain view, and come down little by little to enjoy the art. So that is how to enjoy this museum.”
If the type of structure you want to use doesn't exist, invent it yourself.
Ban shared several examples of an innovative type of structure he pioneered that combines elements of both wood and concrete. By making a form for poured concrete out of cross laminated timber and keeping the timber as a final finish, “the contractor can start working [on the interior] even before the concrete is dry, so we can save a lot of construction time,” he explained.
A few examples of Ban’s use of this method are an office building in Nagoya, Japan; the La Seine Musicale performing arts center outside Paris; and the Swatch Omega Headquarters in Switzerland. Another example of Ban’s innovative use of wood can be seen in his design for the Pompeo Center in Metz, France, where the triangular wood framing of the roof eliminates the need for the use of steel connections.
When designing temporary housing for displaced or unhoused populations, it helps to get creative.
Ban’s emphasis on using local materials for disaster relief and temporary housing structures is perfectly exemplified in two case studies: designs for the survivors of a 1999 earthquake in Turkey and a 2001 earthquake in India. In Turkey, Ban’s usual paper tubes were filled with wastepaper by local children as insulation to keep out the cold. In India, Ban’s preference would have been to use beer crates as a base for temporary structures as he had in the past, but no one in the local population drank beer. This caused Ban and his team to pivot to Coca-Cola crates. Several of the structures are still used as a local clinic.
If you include a giraffe in your design to show scale, your client may take you too literally.
Ban's firm won a competition to design the Japanese headquarters of the Swatch Group in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza shopping district. Navigating a narrow and deep site, Ban designed a series of stacked showrooms for the company’s different brands.
Before the building’s opening, the company’s president came to check on the construction progress. In Ban’s designs that he submitted to the competition, he had included a giraffe for scale in the building’s atrium space.
“She said, ‘Where is the giraffe?’ She misunderstood during my presentation. I showed the section drawing with a giraffe. She was looking forward to seeing the giraffe, and she was very disappointed.” Ban ended up constructing a giraffe out of wood so the executive would accept the building as complete.
Katherine Flynn is director, digital content at AIA.